I sat down with The New Republic’s Marc Tracy to talk about his article arguing that blogging is dying, and my response that blogging actually won, and it’s now serving interests other than those of people who wanted an easy way to publish independently. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion for me was the idea that blogging is changing in part because, to make it emotionally and logistically sustainable long-term, people have to embed themselves in larger organizations and to franchise, making blogs mini-publications with a united vision rather than a singular voice:

We also talked about Jason Collins’ public coming out, and how sports, which were a leader in civil rights when it came to race, have fallen behind the rest of society when it comes to sexual orientation.

Latepass on this one on a day full of screeners. But I really, really love that the new trailer for Man of Steel presents Superman as a story that Lois Lane is tracking down:

I’m not super-crazy about her giving Clark Kent his nom de guerre. But I really appreciate her being the audience surrogate, the one who frames the mystery of who Clark Kent has tried to be and who—and what—he actually is. Superhero stories have been very, very weighted towards internal journeys and self-discovery in recent years. Man of Steel is right to acknowledge that the emergence of people with superpowers would be an even more seismic change for the rest of us who have to live in the world changed by their presence.

At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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Susan Patton’s ur-Jewish Mother letter to the editor, published last week in the Daily Princetonian, in which she tells female students that “By the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?” has had its awful gender politics dissected to death, significantly by Maureen O’Connor at the Cut. But one thing I’ve been struck by is how little discussion there has been of the decision to publish this particular letter by the Daily Princetonian staff. It’s true that alumni with all sorts of nutty opinions write into their former college papers all the time, with all sorts of advice to offer the students who came after them. But Patton’s letter seems to exist at the crux of a number of trends that are a reality in publishing outside of the Ivory Tower.

The Daily Princetonian seems to be crashed by traffic to the site, so I can’t check to see if they serve ads on the site. But assuming that, like their competitors at the Yale Daily News and the Harvard Crimson, they do, the decision to publish Patton’s letter was a demonstration that college newspapers aren’t just a place to learn the basics of reporting and opinion writing: they’re glomming on to the business realities of online publishing as well. Patton’s letter is exactly the kind of thing that is tremendously clicky, to the extent that it was probably worth it financially to the Daily Princetonian to publish it even if the site ended up offline because of the massive influx of readers. And it seems to have been worth it because of that traffic even though Patton’s letter was likely to embarrass her son, who is an existing undergraduate, and wasn’t presented as part of some sort of larger debate, but rather published on its own. Its value as perspective on the Princeton experience, or even on larger work-life balance issues, is extraordinarily minimal. But the letter does represent a particular kind of trolling of young women about their career and family choices that’s done extraordinarily well online, both in terms of the traffic to the primary stories themselves, and in creating a secondary market to discuss and dissect those stories. And while some criticism has tended to focus on publications that rely heavily on these stories, as The Atlantic has in recent years, in this case, the blowback was aimed squarely at Patton, rather than the Daily Princetonian itself.

All in all, it’s a very successful, cynical execution of a well-established strategy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with students coming out of college newspapers—particularly those who want to get into the journalism business for real—knowing what it takes to be successful in the news business. But it does depress me a little bit to see those realities trickle down to publications that have the enormous luxury of being supported by alumni endowments. Why not take advantage of the one time you’ll likely be free of traffic and metrics pressure and just put out the best college paper you can?

The Washington Post’s announcement yesterday that the paper will erect a paywall that charges readers who access more than 20 pieces of content per month was probably inevitable. As much as papers and other publications have tried to monetize online viewers, the infrastructure of those publications were built on the revenues from a model that could extract more money from readers: you’re always going to be able to get more money from audiences when, without paying it, they can’t access the information or data they want at all.

But even as publications that were built on subscriber fees collectively move in the direction of paywalls, the ways they design those paywalls say a great deal about what those publications perceive as their strengths and weaknesses. The Post, the paper explained, “will exempt large parts of its audience from having to pay the fees. Its home-delivery subscribers will have free access to all of The Post’s digital products, and students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces. Access to The Post’s home page, section front pages and classified ads will not be limited.”

Government employees and military personnel are some of the Post’s bread and butter—other national papers don’t cover issues like federal compensation or government openings and closings the same way the Post does, so the Post’s competitors on those issues are trade publications like my former employer, Government Executive. If the Post was confident that its coverage in those areas was vital to its readers, and that it would beat its competitors, it might make sense for them to keep government employees outside of the paywall rather than giving them a passthrough, because those readers would be a reliable source of revenue. But giving them a loophole suggests that the Post needs their eyes but doesn’t trust this core consumer audience to pay for the content—it’s a sign of weakness where the publication should be strong.

It also remains to be seen, I think, how the Post will handle its online-first properties, like Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog. While paywalls are an attempt to recreate the subscription model for the internet age, things like Wonkblog or Max Fisher’s blog lived online first, and trying to move them into a new business model might split up their readership. Paywalling them would be a retreat from the Post’s ventures into digital development, a sign that the company is continuing to have trouble running a mixed strategy. The New York Times’ move to a paywall demonstrated that, even if the paper has had to continue buyouts and reduced ambitions, its core readership remains relatively strong and committed. The Post’s paywall comes with lower expectations in the form of its loopholes than the Times’ has. But even with that curve, I’ll be curious to see what the paper’s final grade turns out to be.

I’ve been in a state of nostalgia since yesterday when word came down from publisher Stephen Mindich that the Boston Phoenix, which any teenager growing up in Boston or the suburbs thereof worth her or his salt should have loved, will no longer publish. The Phoenix was distributed for free rather than on a subscription model, and the reasons for its demise are correspondingly probably different than the ones that have contributed to the long decline of the Boston Globe, which is currently up for sale. It’s one thing to ask people to continue to pay for home delivery of a product, which is a significant investment of money to bring in something that takes up space in the home. And it’s another to have people get out of the hobby of picking up a paper even when it’s free, because they’re reading on devices or their phones, and the idea of

But there’s something sad about the idea that Boston, a metropolitan area that prides itself on its literacy and its history of contributions to journalism and literature, as well as on its high concentration of academics, students, and other brain workers, couldn’t keep an alternative weekly alive. It’s sad, too, that the parts of the Globe worth reading have essentially been whittled down to their Sports and Ideas section. We can’t count on local culture, or literate pride, to save alternative newspapers, much less to support non-alternative publishing.

Over at Vulture, David Edelstein, who started his career as a movie critic at the Phoenix, makes a point about what else we’re losing other than a vibrant media environment when alternative outlets close:

There wasn’t a single hack at the Phoenix when I was there — no one who didn’t care deeply about his or her prose. My first editors, Carolyn Clay (theater) and Stephen Schiff (film) still rank among the best I’ve ever had. The Phoenix (and Real Paper) had been a place for critics like Janet Maslin and David Denby and Jon Landau to shine. Lloyd Schwartz was and is brilliant on classical music. Charlie Pierce — now a superlative political blogger for Esquire — was there, along with writers I deeply admire such as Gail Caldwell, Caroline Knapp, Laura Jacobs, Michael Sragow, Scott Rosenberg, Josh Kornbluth. I’m forgetting many others, but not my colleague on the film desk, Owen Gleiberman, who was among the most generous and convivial I’ve ever known.

In his writing about blogging for free, Ta-Nehisi Coates has also talked about the importance of his work on the Washington City Paper in his future career. Alternative outlets are critical incubators for people with ideas, perspectives, or interests that don’t fit neatly into the slots national publications have available. Those papers provide not just opportunities for those people to write, something that remains available on the internet today, albeit for less money, but opportunities for those people to write and get edited by strong editors. Probably the most critical place I worked in my career before coming to ThinkProgress was Government Executive, a trade publication where I covered federal personnel policy, and got edited by people like Anne Laurent and Tom Shoop. Even though I’m not still writing about the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (which: shockingly interesting), I still rely heavily on their lessons about everything from which kind of music is most conducive to writing features to what kinds of details grab readers. But I’ve spent a lot of time learning culture writing on the fly, and by doing, and without the oversight of a former critic. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing it that way, or with anyone else starting your own blog, or writing for Tiny Mixtapes, or whoever else will have you. But I do think that it’s a real loss when outlets where people can get extensive editing and professional training in criticism, in local reporting, and in a lot of other skills, close. Diffusing the structure by which people get opportunities has a lot of advantages. But removing places where it’s possible to get a lot of professional education and improvement isn’t one of them.

In the annual meeting of the Disney Company’s shareholders on Wednesday, Justin Danhof, the general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, which owns Disney stock, asked company president Bob Iger what he intended to do to about a liberal bias in the company’s news outlets, including ESPN and ABC News:

It’s particularly strange to hear Danhof cite Rob Parker suggesting that Robert Griffin III was “a cornball brother” for being engaged to a white woman and possibly having Republican political beliefs as evidence of some sort of liberal bias on the part of ESPN. The idea that it’s liberal to believe that people should date and marry within their racial and ethnic groups as a form of solidarity has no particular basis in the existing discourse. And while it’s not unreasonable to debate why African-American or Latino voters tend to vote Democratic or Republican based on those parties’ histories and platforms, I don’t know that there are a lot of people on either side of the aisle who saw Parker’s condemnation of Griffin as a constructive contribution to that debate. But in any case, it wasn’t as if Disney endorsed Parker’s analysis of Griffin’s racial loyalties. ESPN suspended Parker for 30 days over the comments and ultimately chose not to renew his contract, citing his comments about Griffin as a factor.

The example of Brian Ross suggesting that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado midnight screening of The Dark Knight is potentially a better example of bias, but it’s also a case study in how a broken reporting and vetting process can interact with political assumptions to put bad information on the air. The problem is less that Ross made that assumption—I don’t think there’s anything wrong about thinking through potential political affiliation and other motivations or influences as inspirations for reporting— but that he broadcast it without ensuring that it was factually accurate. If there were procedures in place that prevented Ross from attributing political motivations and organizational affiliations to the man who turned out to be James Holmes without solid reporting behind it, then the fact that he considered Holmes’ affiliations off-air wouldn’t have mattered. And it’s not as if it would be appropriate to have a rule that prevented, say, the on-air identification of Holmes as a Democrat or a member of an Occupy group, if that had turned out to be correct. The problem isn’t politics. It’s fact-checking. Iger’s acknowledgement that “we have at times either presented the news in a slightly inaccurate way through mistakes or in ways that we weren’t necessarily proud of,” is the right problem to identify. But it’s true that it would have been helpful if ABC News president Ben Sherwood had been more willing to publicly address the procedures or violations thereof that lead to Ross’ broadcast, which would have shifted the emphasis from political problems to reportorial ones.

Shifting that debate won’t satisfy everyone, of course. There are some conservatives who will always work backwards from outcomes, convinced that reporting that doesn’t reach conservative conclusions must be flawed because it didn’t arrive in a place that confirms their worldview or that makes them comfortable. But news organizations should stick to fixing processes that produce both inaccuracies and the perception of bias, rather than letting themselves be nudged into seeking outcomes that will take heat off of them.